If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This Part 16

"I'll take the check," Kate says. "But first..." She gestures toward the building, the ladies room again. She stands, she tries to, but the world is lost, a black screen fluttering before her eyes.

"Here," the girl says. "Sit. Here. Here."

Somewhere far, somewhere else, the metal table is searing into Kate's cheek. A hand touches her. A motorcycle guns. There is a voice. Then nothing at all.

"Kate's heading out again," Arthur would say. "Hold steady, there... tim-ber!" It was a family joke. Even at her wedding, in the receiving line, she had needed to sit for fear that she would crumple to the floor. "Good thing you're marrying a..."

"Doctor," Stephen had supplied.

The waitress is holding a gla.s.s of water to Kate's lips. Kate shakes her head. No.

"You should," Anna says, now sitting. "You should drink."

Kate takes the gla.s.s in both her hands, then puts it down. "It's so silly..." she begins. "It's the heat. And I haven't eaten. But really, I'm fine."

Anna looks concerned. Gone is the professional smile. She touches the gla.s.s, moves it an inch toward Kate, repeating her entreaty to drink. She suggests that the husband should be called. Kate can't drive, she says. She shouldn't drive.

"I'm fine. I will be. In just a few minutes..."

"It isn't safe," Anna says.

"I have no choice." Kate can hear the sharp edge of her tone, but does nothing to soften it. "I'm all alone."

Anna nods, slowly, as though considering, and then she looks toward the cafe building. "Maybe you can help me," she says. "Maybe I can help you."

As Kate sips at the water, the girl tells her that she herself has no ride home at the end of her shift. She knows the house where Kate is staying, and she can drive her there. She has a cousin who can fetch her then. "My own ride has disappeared," she says.

The chill of the water spreads through Kate's body, waking her.

"It isn't only you," Anna says. "Or me. It isn't safe for others, to have you drive your car so..."

"Drunk?" The girl is silent. "Well, you're right," Kate says. "About the others. It's the others, isn't it, who always get hurt?" She puts down the gla.s.s. "Thank you. I accept your offer. I appreciate your help."

Anna tells her she only has to work a few more minutes. They will be gone very soon. Kate should use the ladies room, she should be ready to go home.

Fifteen minutes into the drive, the women pa.s.s the site of the crash. Anna slows down and points out the small roadside shrine someone built, a cross made of white-painted sticks, a basket of purple flowers, drooping, long dead now themselves. She tells Kate about the tourist who was killed. A man, she believes.

"This is why you have to be... to be..."

"Careful," Kate supplies. "Yes. This is why." She thinks of asking Anna to stop the car, but her mind is moving slowly and the shrine has been left far behind before the thought can leave her lips. She wonders if she will come back tomorrow, maybe bring fresh flowers. She wonders how long it will be there, once she is back home-a.s.suming she doesn't land in an Italian jail instead.

Night is still some time off, but the sky has lost its brightness. Still, Kate can feel the heat of the air through the open window. She is just beginning to doze off when Anna asks if it's okay that they stop by her house. She may be needed to help with her brother, she says. It's on their way. It won't take very long. Kate agrees without thought. "Anything," she says, then realizes how very little she cares what happens now. Nothing feels real anymore. She is in a car she doesn't know, with a girl she doesn't know, and she has loosened the truths of her life with this girl, allowed reality, which has been supposed to hit her, like the slap on a newborn child, instead to fade and disappear.

Sitting up a bit, she asks Anna how old her brother is. He's seventeen, she says, but that isn't his true age. Not really. He's like a child in a grown body. Like a baby. He is mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded, she says.

"He can be a problem for my mother. I only want to look at them and tell them I'm going to my cousin for the night. It won't take long. Then I can bring you home."

"Take your time," Kate says. "I'm in no hurry to be home."

Soon, Anna pulls the car up into a dirt patch-barely a driveway. On the lawn are terra-cotta pots, most of them empty, two or three holding scrubby shrubs. Anna repeats that they won't be here long.

"It doesn't matter," Kate says.

"You can come in, if you like. It isn't..." Anna pauses. "It isn't so nice," she says.

"It doesn't matter to me," Kate says again. "It doesn't matter to me at all."

It isn't clear to Kate what does matter now.

Inside the house, the air is dark in a way that night is not, a hazy dimness falling like gauze. A woman, younger than Kate and worn thin as a leaf, sits with a newspaper folded on her lap, where it looks more like a covering of some kind than something to be read. An enormous boy, his long hair pulled into a ponytail, sprawls on the couch. He wears jeans and an orange T-shirt. His feet are bare. As she steps closer, Kate can see filth on the b.a.l.l.s and heels of his soles, only the high arches not black with grime. The sight holds her attention for several seconds, until she forces her gaze away.

Anna speaks rapidly, quietly to them both and Kate picks out the story-her own story. A customer. Wine. A husband. A home.

She looks back at the boy. His eyes are like one-way streets, taking in, taking in. Nothing revealed. Kate tries to smile and he looks away.

In one corner is a stove, something cooking. As Kate steps closer, the smells of lemon, of rosemary, something to long for, rise in the air, at odds with the squalor and sadness of the room. Anna throws her purse down on the long wooden table and pulls out a straight-backed chair. "Please," she says. "Please have this seat. I won't be long."

All around Kate are unfamiliar sounds and scents, unfamiliar sights, people she understands she cannot know. She closes her eyes, as though to limit this flood. She concentrates on the voices only, how they stop one another, then seem to spur each other on. The boy speaks only in answers. S S and and no no. Anna's tone is the questioning one, the mother the hardest for Kate to understand. She says the most, all of it addressed to Anna, all of it in urgent whispers. Soon, Kate picks out a pattern: the mother speaks, a long string of words. Then Anna asks a question to the boy, who answers his sister, yes or no. The mother speaks again. There are no silences between them. None of the pauses Kate has spent a lifetime filling-or not.

She opens her eyes. Anna is by the stove, dishing food into a bowl.

"We won't be long," she says. "They'll be okay here, while I'm with my cousin. I just wanted to... to be sure."

Kate needs the bathroom, and Anna sends her up the stairs.

"Just a few minutes more," she says. She looks like a different girl from the one at the cafe. She looks a decade older. "I'll be ready to go when you're back down."

In the car again, Kate asks where the father is, and the girl tells her he left long ago. "I think it was the sadness. About Marco, about... life. Sadness. And maybe he is a..."

"Womanizer?" Kate asks. "A man who likes ladies too much?"

"No. Not that. A man... a man who is afraid. There's a word..."

"Coward."

"Yes, that's the word. My father is a coward. So he left."

"Many men do leave," Kate says. "Do you see him still?"

"No. I don't want to."

"I thought maybe the cafe, in the kitchen... ? I heard voices..."

"No. He is someone else."

Her tone bars further pushing, so Kate asks about the cousin, and Anna smiles, as if remembering a joke. He is her best friend, she says. He is the funniest person she knows. "We laugh whenever we are together."

"I don't have cousins like that," Kate says. "I'm not sure I have anyone like that."

"That's too bad. You have to have people for fun."

At the farmhouse, Anna parks and says she'll call now for her ride, but Kate has already realized she doesn't want the girl to leave.

"If you stay for dinner, for the night, I'll drive you back to Orvieto tomorrow. Or to your home."

Anna says she is going with the cousin to a festival in his town, a festival of flowers. They have plans for the day.

"I'll take you there, then. I'll be sober by tomorrow. I'm sober now." It's almost true. "I just don't want to be... to be..."

"Alone?"

"That's it," Kate says. "I don't want to be alone."

"But where is your husband?" Anna looks toward the dark house. "He isn't here?"

"My husband has left me. Like your father. He too is a coward. And he won't be coming back."

Kate's cell rings two times as together the women heat up the landlady's latest offering-a veal shank about which Anna has nothing good to say-and pour themselves more wine. She ignores it. It is the children calling, no doubt. Martha wanting to know when Kate will be home. Or possibly, just possibly, she thinks, it is Stephen again, with his doing-the-right-thing tone of voice. Checking in on her the way one checks in on an ancient, burdensome aunt.

Let them go to h.e.l.l, she thinks. Let them all go to h.e.l.l. Every single one of them.

Over the meal, she asks Anna about her brother. Has he always had problems? Or was there an accident? An illness? Anna tells her he has been like this since birth. There was something wrong with the pregnancy, she explains. Her face seems to slacken as she speaks. She tells Kate her mother had been sick with fever. "I'm six years older. And a girl. My mother is not good with him. So, he has always been my..."

"Responsibility?"

"Yes, like that. Like my job. My mother and my father, they are both people who... people who..." As Anna concentrates on pouring more wine, Kate allows the moment to extend, understanding with something like grat.i.tude that this silence isn't hers to fill. "They are not strong with problems," Anna finally says. "And then they have a big problem in their life, so I have to be good with it. I know there are better doctors for him, in Rome. I did research on the computer at the library. There are people who can help. They can't fix him, but he can have a better life than this. There are things to do. But it's expensive. It's not just like a pill he would take."

"You're so young to be so responsible." It's true. She looks like a child.

"I don't feel like I'm young."

"I had a brother, too," Kate begins. "But I wasn't... I wasn't... We were twins." Kate thinks of the shrine. Of the ashes upstairs. "He died," she says. "He's dead."

"I'm sorry. Were you close? Were you friends?"

Kate considers. "Yes, we were. Most of the time. I don't think I was always a good sister, though. I was... I was impatient with him. Very often." In the car. Just before the crash. She had been so angry. She says nothing more.

"I am also impatient with Marco. It's very bad. All the time, I feel..."

"Guilty," Kate supplies. "You feel guilty. All the time."

"Yes. I think life is... hard."

"It's very difficult. It can be."

"But hardest for women. More difficult for us."

Kate frowns. Is that really it? It seems too simple; and she isn't sure. Was it not difficult for Arthur too? Difficult for Marco? For the cowardly husbands who have left? Was it not difficult even for the ones who have fled?

"I think it may be difficult for us all," she finally says. "For brothers and sisters, both."

It's decided that Anna will sleep in Arthur's room-which Kate calls the spare room-and use Arthur's bath-the spare bath. While Anna clears away the dishes, Kate straightens the bedclothes and strips the s.p.a.ce of his things, bringing them into her own room, where they sit in a small, disordered heap. The laptop, the shaving kit, a pair of dress oxfords, the neatly folded shirts, and, atop the pile, the box of ashes. Only things Only things, she tells herself, leaving them there. Only things Only things.

On the landing, she hands Anna a gown and the women say good night. As Kate thanks Anna once again for the ride, for her kindness, for staying with her, she kisses her cheek and a smell of smoke, of meals, the smell of Kate's own hours in Orvieto, rises off the girl, then vanishes when she steps away.

For just a few minutes, Kate stays outside the door, listening to the noises of the house. The water running. The pipes creaking-complaining, as if making a great effort to perform the task they were crafted to perform. As if old. As if tired. Did she notice these sounds the night Arthur was here? She doesn't remember; it all seems new. She was another woman then. Kate closes her eyes, and the swing of the bathroom door sighs itself into her thoughts. She has been many women, she understands, has slipped surefooted through the years from one ident.i.ty to the next. Daughter, sister, wife, mother. And now to be this-to be a woman without even the illusion of knowing herself. The sensation is like flight.

When she hears nothing more, she opens her eyes, knocks, and then opens the door. How strange the impulse is, but how strong. Anna is there, sitting up against the pillows, lost in Kate's own white ruffles, like a child waiting to be tucked in, or like a bride. Kate sits by her side on the bed.

"Are you comfortable?"

The girl says that she is. She nods her head.

It's hard for Kate to know how to begin. "Maybe this isn't my business," she says. "But I heard today... I want to ask you, Anna. I heard a man at the cafe. I was pa.s.sing by the kitchen, and there was an argument. His voice..."

The girl nods. "Carlos. The owner."

"He sounded very angry." Kate moves her hand to Anna's cheek. Her fingers barely remember softness of this kind. "No man should ever talk to you that way."

"Carlos is mean. He's a terrible man. He owns the cafe, but thinks he owns me. Like I belong to him. When he touches me..."

"You shouldn't let him touch you."

"His hands..."

"What?" Kate has been touched by only one man in her life. Stephen, gentle, cool, loving at one time. "Is he rough with you?"

"His hands have no feeling. From the stove, from being burned. They are dead. He touches me, but cannot feel. I hate this. This not being felt. When he touches me, I feel myself disappear. Like I am not real." Her face seems to have grown paler, as though the white of the gown has soaked into her skin.

"Don't let him," Kate says. "Why should he touch you?"

Anna reaches for Kate's hand, and guides it to her own shoulder. Kate almost pulls it back, as though she might be burned. As though she is still herself. But she doesn't.

"Tell me," Anna says. "Tell me what my skin feels like."

Kate's hand lies motionless for a moment; then she begins very lightly to trace circles down Anna's arm.

"You feel me?" Anna asks. "You feel my skin?"

"Yes." Smooth as moonlight. "Yes, I do. You feel..."

"Tell me."

"You feel soft." It isn't right. It isn't enough. "You feel..." Kate watches her fingers, wrinkled at every joint, against the silken olive of Anna's skin. It is like touching a memory, reaching into the past and caressing what is gone. "You feel beautiful," she says.

Anna opens her eyes. She touches Kate's arm, barely grazing the bruises there. Her fingers on Kate's skin feel so strange. Being touched by anyone feels strange.

"Your husband..." Anna begins.